Port Congestion Is Back. This Time, It's Different.

Published: April 20, 2026

Anyone who managed supply chains in 2021 and 2022 knows what severe port congestion looks like. Dozens of ships anchored offshore, waiting days — sometimes weeks — for a berth to open up. Empty containers piling up in the wrong hemisphere. Lead times doubling overnight.

It was chaotic. And eventually, it resolved.

What's building in 2026 looks familiar on the surface. But beneath the headlines, the mechanics are entirely different — and so is the path to recovery. The playbook that worked last time won't work this time.

This article is part of our ongoing coverage of the 2026 shipping crisis. For the full picture, start with How the Strait of Hormuz Crisis Rewrote the 2026 Shipping Outlook and The Strait of Hormuz Is Closed — And So Is the Suez Canal

2021 vs. 2026: Same Symptom, Different Disease

In 2021, congestion was demand-driven. A pandemic-era spending surge flooded ports with more cargo than terminals, equipment, and inland infrastructure could absorb. The bottleneck was at the destination — containers sat idle because there weren't enough workers, trucks, or warehouse space to move them.

In 2026, the problem originates upstream, at the chokepoints themselves.

That displaced capacity doesn't disappear. It bunches up. Vessels that were once spread across predictable schedules now arrive in clusters at transshipment hubs that were never designed to absorb that kind of simultaneous surge. The result: severe congestion at ports that had nothing to do with the original crisis.

Where the Pressure Is Building Right Now

Singapore and Southeast Asia

Singapore is bearing the heaviest load in Asia. Yard utilization at PSA terminals is running at 80–90%, and port authorities have had to prioritize westbound loaders to manage the backlog. Average vessel waiting times are hovering around 1.3 to 1.5 days.

Those numbers may not sound alarming in isolation — but compounded with broader schedule unreliability across the network, the cascading effect is significant.

Tanjung Pelepas is under similar strain, with waiting times around 1.8 days. Berth availability has been further reduced by crane installation works, and vessel clustering has made dynamic berthing increasingly difficult to manage.

Northern Europe

Rotterdam is navigating multiple stressors simultaneously. Yard utilization at ECT is near 80%, second-modality delays are running 24 to 72 hours, and the MVII terminal is operating at 90% yard density. High winds have further compressed operational windows.

Antwerp experienced one of its most disruptive periods in recent memory following a Belgian pilot strike that left more than 130 vessels waiting at Belgian ports. Inbound and outbound movements were severely impacted, and the ripple effects took weeks to clear.

The Middle East: A Category of Its Own

The situation in the Gulf is in a different league entirely. Khor Al Fakkan is heavily congested. The ports of Bahrain and Salalah were attacked and temporarily closed. Severe GPS jamming continues to force vessels to shelter offshore rather than proceed to berth.

On April 8, the US and Iran announced a two-week ceasefire — but the strait remains effectively closed. In the first 24 hours following the announcement, only five vessels transited. Iran is demanding permission for individual passages and has reportedly charged transit fees exceeding $1 million per ship. The Iranian navy has published a mine map designating approved corridors: routes that hug Iran's coastline near Larak Island, already dubbed the "Tehran Toll Booth" by industry analysts.

As of April 12, over 600 vessels — including 325 tankers — remain stranded inside the Gulf. The IMO reports that more than 20,000 seafarers are awaiting evacuation. ADNOC's CEO put it plainly: "The Strait of Hormuz is not open. Access is being restricted, conditioned and controlled." In peacetime, more than 120 vessels transited the strait daily. That number is currently in single digits.

Why This Congestion Is Harder to Clear

In 2021, congestion was fundamentally a queue problem. Once demand normalized and labor bottlenecks cleared, ports drained. The underlying network was intact — ships just couldn't unload fast enough.

In 2026, the network itself is distorted. Four structural factors are making this

congestion more persistent.

Vessel bunching compounds at every stop. A ship running 10 days late doesn't arrive at Singapore alone — it arrives alongside several others that were rerouted and delayed by the same events. Terminals can't absorb that kind of concentrated demand. The delay doesn't get absorbed at the hub. It gets passed downstream.

Blank sailings are creating equipment imbalances. Carriers pulling capacity from routes they can't reliably serve means containers are accumulating in the wrong locations. Empty repositioning is expensive and slow under normal conditions — with two chokepoints simultaneously constrained, the rebalancing path is significantly longer.

Alliance networks weren't designed for dual-chokepoint disruption. The configurations that took effect in 2025 — Gemini Cooperation, the reformed MSC network, and others — were built for efficiency in stable conditions. Simultaneous Cape rerouting stress-tests hub-and-spoke models in ways their architects didn't plan for. Ports that were designed as relay hubs are now functioning as holding areas.

Air freight is not a viable fallback. When ocean transit becomes unreliable, shippers typically shift time-sensitive cargo to air. That option has largely collapsed. Gulf carriers — Emirates, Qatar Airways, Etihad — account for a major share of global belly cargo capacity. With Middle East airspace restricted or unsafe, global air cargo capacity dropped roughly 18% almost overnight. Rates from South Asia to North America jumped approximately 50% in under two weeks. The fallback is expensive, unreliable, and capacity-constrained.

Which Industries Are Most Exposed

Not every shipper feels congestion in the same way. Four sectors face the sharpest exposure right now.

Just-in-time manufacturers built supply chains on the assumption that predictable transit windows could substitute for inventory buffers. That assumption no longer holds. Every additional day of port dwell time translates directly into production risk.

Asia-Europe shippers are absorbing the full compounding effect: Cape rerouting extends transit times, Singapore and Tanjung Pelepas add waiting days, and European port disruptions extend dwell time at the destination. A voyage that previously took 30 days can now stretch to 45 to 50.

Gulf importers and exporters face the most direct pressure. Companies sourcing from or selling into Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and neighboring markets are operating in an environment where port access, vessel availability, and routing options are all simultaneously constrained.

Consumer goods companies with peak season exposure are attempting to build inventory buffers into a system where buffer capacity is already stretched thin. If the crisis persists into Q3, pre-positioning for peak season will collide directly with sustained congestion.

What Companies Should Do Now

Act Immediately

Revise your lead time assumptions. If Asia-Europe planning was based on 35-day transit times, the realistic figure today is 48 to 52 days. That number needs to flow through procurement cycles, customer commitments, and inventory reorder points without delay. For a broader view of rate and capacity scenarios, see our 2026 shipping outlook.

Audit in-transit shipments. Identify where your cargo is relative to the most congested hubs. Vessels currently in Singapore or Tanjung Pelepas may be carrying schedule variance that hasn't yet reached your downstream planning.

Evaluate air freight now, not after a delay is confirmed. By the time a delay is certain, you're competing for capacity against every other shipper who reached the same conclusion simultaneously.

Over the Next One to Three Months

Move away from rigid, single-carrier contracts. Fixed-rate annual agreements are buckling under surcharge pressure and routing changes. Build optionality into your agreements: alternative gateways, split sailings, and multi-carrier allocations provide meaningful flexibility when schedules break down.

Explore alternative port gateways. Ports like Colombo and Port Klang are absorbing some of the overflow from Singapore and Tanjung Pelepas. Secondary European gateways may also offer shorter queue times than the primary hubs. These aren't perfect solutions, but in a constrained environment, shorter is better.

Communicate with customers. Delayed communication of schedule changes consistently causes more downstream supply chain damage than the delays themselves.

Looking Further Ahead

The April 8 ceasefire announcement raised brief hopes — but it also demonstrated exactly how fragile any near-term resolution will be. A diplomatic pause that leaves 600 vessels stranded and transit volumes in single digits is not a logistics solution.

Even when full transit does eventually resume, the industry will need months to unwind vessel bunching, rebalance equipment across trade lanes, and restore schedule reliability. Companies that treat this disruption as a temporary anomaly — rather than a signal about structural vulnerability — are likely to find themselves unprepared for the next one.

The case for nearshoring, regional inventory distribution, and multi-source procurement has never been more concrete.

The Bottom Line

The congestion of 2021 resolved because the underlying cause — a demand surge — was temporary. What's building in 2026 is structurally embedded, and the April 8 ceasefire underscores the point rather than refuting it.

A diplomatic agreement that leaves 600 vessels stranded and daily transits in single digits is not a reopening. The network distortion will take months to unwind even under optimistic scenarios.

The companies managing this best right now share a few common traits: they updated their assumptions early, built flexibility into their logistics relationships before the crisis peaked, and are communicating clearly with customers rather than waiting for certainty that isn't coming.

Resilience isn't a strategy you deploy when disruption arrives. It's the infrastructure you build before it does.

Supply chain under pressure from the current disruption? Movargo helps shippers assess exposure, identify routing alternatives, and maintain service continuity across volatile markets. Reach out to our team to discuss your 2026 strategy.